It's supply chain more than design. Those historic winters of '77 & '78 beat up the fleet real good too, but they were 40 years younger and a majority fleet entrenched at a main shop back then. Riverside, Reservoir, Arborway, and Watertown could clean motors, swap motors, scramble parts to Mattapan Yard and recover fleet uptime vastly quicker because the scale was orders of magnitude different. Today just getting parts and labor to fix a propulsion short could take days per car simply as a function of scarcity. Therefore the needs are totally different on the prevention/preservation side vs. when PCC propulsion maint was more scalable w/ parts supply that was more expendable. Snow prevention in the coming rebuilds addresses that new reality of tiny scale head-on, thankfully.

An MBTA trolley driver paid a friend $2,000 to don a Halloween mask and "attack" him while he was on the job, allowing him to fraudulently collect workers' compensation and disability insurance, according to authorities.

Thomas Lucey, 46, is facing charges of insurance fraud and other counts, including misleading police, after the bizarre plot crumbled when police pulled fingerprints off a fake plastic pumpkin the so-called "attacker" left behind and traced it back to Lucey's friend, according to Transit Police and prosecutors.